WebTUI – A CSS Library That Brings the Beauty of Terminal UIs to the Browser

I don't understand the obsession with 1980s terminals. They're even less powerful than the contemporary 8-bit home computers. It's perfectly OK to be a retro enthusiast, it's another thing to claim that this is the peak tech to power our modern CLIs, or a solid foundation for portable UIs.

From the docs:

    Stop thinking in standard CSS units like px, em, rem, %
    Start thinking in Character Cells for spacing, sizing, and positioning

A VT102 already has a character grid, but it needs a serial protocol to allow applications on the mainframe to talk to it. You can loop around this and use the raw mode to address individual cells.

The web browser has an insanely powerful typographic and layout engine. Now we're looping back into character cells. Something went wrong here, at least once.

That said, I like the aesthetic and the default color palette. It's quirky, but it has its places.

Because it's how normal people think. This under that. This after that, left-aligned with that. Text modes are the most basic tech supporting it.

Css uses boxing with no sugar (like size groups or custom allocation). Boxing is this in that in that in that, sometimes stretched. And now when you want A and B in different boxes to align well, you're screwed, cause it creates an invisible fragile tree of braces that hold everything in place.

Maybe they would use a much more natural constraints-based language instead of text modes. Like, literally, "this under that, and these five left- and width-aligned". But web is reluctant to add it, because when not used carefully it could slow down first interactive renders by 0.01% out of average 10s (that is, assuming the same moronic site structure for some reason and the code that renders it).